Sunday, June 10, 2012

China's Indian Ocean Strategy: A String of Pearls

For China, the
Indian Ocean is of vital national interest.A vast amount of the energy and natural resources China
imports from the Middle East, Africa, and Australia travel over the Ocean’s
waters, as do the goods produced in China’s “workshop of the world” factory
base.Moreover, the Eurasian
states littoral to the Ocean’s northern reaches, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of
Bengal, are booming economies with huge resource and population bases, as well
as dangerous military powers (with nuclear weapons in the case of Pakistan and
India).

Historically,
the seaborne shipping journey has had two chokepoints—the Strait of Hormuz in
the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia.For China, the route between these
points is known as its Sea Lane of Communication (SLOC) in the parlance of U.S.
military planners.As it stands
today, and as it has stood since the days of the British Empire, the
Anglo-American alliance has put great effort into militarily securing these
chokepoints, and forming security agreements with the large powers of the
region.The U.S.-India military
relationship grew very close after 9/11, and Washington even de facto
recognized India’s nuclear weapons capability, which India had flouted the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty to achieve.Australia and Indonesia have both been longtime partners in
U.S. post-World War II foreign policy (and hosts to U.S. military bases), as
has Pakistan, although that relationship in beginning to sour.Thailand, which was a vital American
ally during the Vietnam War, has also once again grown close to U.S.
planners.The military nerve center
of this operation is the secretive Diego Garcia Naval Station, a colonial
leftover in Britain’s “Indian Ocean Territory” located at the southern tip of
the Chagos Archipelago.

In the face of
this militarization, China has embarked on its own strategy, of constructing
highly developed ports in key strategic locations along the Ocean’s littoral.This strategy was referred to as
building a “String of Pearls” in a 2004 Pentagon commissioned report by
military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, and the name has stuck.[1]One such “pearl” is a major port
located in Gwadahar, in Pakistan’s Baluch region on the Arabian Sea.Traveling southeast along the shipping
route, the next strategic pearl is located at Hambantota, on the island of Sri
Lanka. Another, a container
shipping facility, is located at Chittagong, Bangladesh’s main port.Over the past decade, Myanmar has also
moved very close to Beijing, and key Chinese energy, military, and shipping
facilities are located all along Myanmar’s dangling coastline.These include a deepwater port at
Sitwe, a large oil facility at the offshore Shwe fields, and a base at Coco
Island supposedly used for electronic espionage.The Myanmar infrastructure projects are supplemented by
China’s Irawaddy transportation corridor, currently under construction which
features duel oil and gas pipelines and a high-speed rail line running North to
China’s Yunann province.Perhaps
China’s most audacious proposal is to build the Kra canal across Thailand’s
southern isthmus, connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and
bypassing the Straits of Malacca all together.[2]A string of ports and airstrips has
also been developed in the South China Sea, all the way up to Hong Kong.

Ostensibly,
these ports are purely for civilian use, as the Chinese military has no overt
foreign bases, but states like Myanmar have large military-to-military programs
with the Chinese.This has led
China’s geopolitical rivals, namely the U.S. and India, to fear that the
Chinese pearls will be militarized and turned into bases for the growing
Chinese Navy.Chinese high-speed
rail tracks also pose a threat in this regard, as it is easy to imagine them
being used for troop transport in a crisis.This militarization, however is not yet a reality and is far
from becoming one, as pointed out in a report by Foreign Policy in Focus.[3]